“I was all set to run a column this week about the deplorable lack of even marginally acceptable word processors for Linux — I even had it all written — when along came TextMaker and blew that plan out of the water. (I still like the product, even though it has now made more work for me.) But the newfound existence of TextMaker suggests another, similar but broader, question: Why can’t the community write something that good?” Read the editorial at LinuxAndMain by Dennis E. Powell.
Editorial: Company or community?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Kword is excelent
OO.O is good but needs a face lift
abiword is good but could be better
heck kwrite is good for simple reports for school and such.
Every single person I know who as ever seen what LaTeX and its friendly GUI companion LyX can do for you never wanted to start *Word again. And its a community work if that matters.
ive sat down and practically written the future of mankind,
and ive done it with Kword
And why do you want a word processor at all? First off, the combination of Joe and groff is every bit as good as Wordstar was when Arthur C. Clarke used it on his Kaypro. Emacs has a LaTeX mode, but even without one, it isn’t that hard to write LaTeX.
If you are only writing articles for submission to magazines, you are often discouraged from doing your own formatting anyway, so Vim is more than adequate, giving you many powerful functions for reading your text, moving things around, searching by regex.
Writers often say that a word processor is their primary tool, and they understand it in and out, but coders live in a world of yanking and moving text around, too. There must be some common ground.
But if there isn’t, I think what we need to do is get a list started up with some professional writers, and collect some opinions about what they value most in a word processor. One of their number should select volunteer programmers from the community and behave as an interface to the building process, acting as a client. Programmer and client write a preliminary spec, and the code evolves from there. The client needs to be understanding of certain issues that are just hard because of a lack of good information, specifically in terms of reading files from other word processors.
I must admit I have tried AbiWord, KWord, OpenOffice, Maxwell, whatever has come out, and I find them unusable, but I find Microsoft Word and Word Perfect unusable too. Either they are crashy, or they babysit you to death, or I spend half of my time formatting by hand what could be tooled by a few typesetting macros (back to LaTeX)…
While all of what he says is true, it hardly comes as news to the computing world at large.
Yes, programmers write for themselves and other programmers.
No, the availability of source code is of no consequence to the majority which can’t code.
In the main. I don’t use word processors for anything other than the occasional report, so OO is perfectly fine for me, but I can see that it might frustrate someone who wants to write something with formatted columns, tables, etc., etc.
There’s another aspect to this that needs to be considered. The free software community is SO determined to make their products “free” (both speech AND beer) that they’re ignoring the fact that there are people like me who will WILLINGLY pay for good software.
Those of us who’ve migrated from Windows to Linux are quite willing to pay for something that works.
The GPL is flawed. It’s a wonderful idea that ignores market realities. It depends on an honor system in a less-than-honorable world. When someone can take Red Hat or Mandrake’s hard work, burn CD copies and then sell them for $5.00 a pop, that’s just plain WRONG.
I’m all for open source — and more importantly, open standards. The data on my computer is MINE; I have a right to know the format in which it is stored and transmitted.
But until the free software community does get away from the idea that free speech DOES equal “free beer,” there’s going to be a lack of innovation.
Just my 2 cents worth.
I didn’t say anything.
Maybe he was refering to when you said, “Read the editorial at LinuxAndMain by Dennis E. Powell.”
The authors of TextMaker recompile it in the FreeBSD rather than claim it works with FreeBSD’s Linux emulator.
debman: abiword is good but could be better
Have you tried the AbiWord2 (with gtk2) yet? I find it’s a very good, but a feature is missing: grammar check
But until the free software community does get away from the idea that free speech DOES equal “free beer,” there’s going to be a lack of innovation.
Free as in speech and free as in beer have to go hand in hand. Without the freedom to re-distribute Free software there is no freedom at all. For example, if the original author of a peice of software goes bankrupt, the fact that the source is available is of no use if that source and its improvements can be redistributed. The software is essentially dead; the very anti-thesis of Free software.
When someone can take Red Hat or Mandrake’s hard work, burn CD copies and then sell them for $5.00 a pop, that’s just plain WRONG.
No it isn’t. Mostly for the reasons I give above, but also because the software itself is free anyway; it was free to RedHat and it should be free to the end users. RedHat do not make money from the software, they make money from selling support, consultation and value added systems to OEM’s and companies. Heck, Mandrake itself was originally derived from RedHat. The couldn’t do that if they had to pay RedHat $50 for each copy of Mandrake they sell.
as far as diagnosing the problem: there really are no _excellent_ word processors for Linux, or specialized processors such as screen-writing software that can compete with stuff written for Windows.
One obviously can’t blame developers – it is not an itch they have. No one has the right to demand they work for free.
But not being a hard-core programmer and not having the time to do it myself, I am one of those who would be WILLING to pay good money for a Linux commercial solution. I bet you there is quite a market for commercial Linux solutions in general – don’t underestimate it.
Whilst OOo looks pretty crufty and the interface is a bit different to the usual Windows offerings, I’ve found it to be an adequate replacement for Word. For really long documents it’s superb – way better than Word. I always seem to be fighting some stupid formatting feature/bug when working on long documents in Word whereas OOo tends to stay out of my way.
YMMV.
I agree. It’s time that the vocal minority of Linux zealots give up on their communist dreams. If Linux is to be successful (large market share) it will have to seamlessly coexist with commercial software. That is a simple fact.
I applaud articles like this from Mr. Powell. We need to enourage companies to port or create software for the Linux platform. Are we to live off reverse engineering forever? I will personally cherish the day when Quicktime, WMPlayer, and a better Realplayer are available on Linux.
I have downloaded and checked out Textmaker for Windows. They let you try out a slightly limited version. Word file support seems OK, but I have few Word files on disk. My main word processor is Word Perfect 10 for Windows, one of the big, bloated packages. Still, with service pack 3 it loads relatively quickly.
Textmaker is faster, about the same overall speed as Abiword. Textmaker lacks a couple of features present in Word Perfect, anyway. The first missing item is columns. Support for graphic boxes is somewhat limited by file type and by size. Neither the graphic boxes or text boxes support captions. Table support, like Word’s, is pretty basic. If you want formulas, use a separate spreadsheet. There is nothing like Word Perfect’s built in spread sheet and drawing support.
Still, Textmaker has one thing going for it. It supports text frames that either are fixed, or that grow dynamically in the direction you specify. They also have numerous wrapping options. Even better, you can link one text frame to another. These features take you beyond word processing and into the realm of desktop publishing. You also do columns and captions via text boxes. It is slower, but ultimately more flexible.
That said, don’t rush out and grab it for its desktop publishing finesse. Publisher for Windows is far more convenient, so is Word Perfect, if only for their booklet printing options. Yes, you can print booklets in Textmaker, but you will have to set up the linking text boxes in advance. You can get used to it, but it represents more work. No sir, I’ll take bloat most times. It usually contains something useful.
” I agree. It’s time that the vocal minority of Linux zealots give up on their communist dreams. If Linux is to be successful (large market share) it will have to seamlessly coexist with commercial software. That is a simple fact. ”
Wow. Congrats on writing the dumbest things I’ve read this month. You sir take the cake. That is a simple fact.
I downloaded TM and was really amazed.
a) it’s FAST!!!
b) it has convenient, clean UI layout,
c) installation is as simple as unpacking a .tgz archive,
d) MSWord compatability is excellent — actually I haven’t experienced a single glitch (within the limits of supported features)
My only complaints are:
1) lack of groupwork facilities
2) TM doesn’t support comment’s
Both of which are a must for me, ’cause I’m working in a publishing house. OOo is close to what I need as far as overall functionality is concerned, but its M$ compatibility is insufficient for an intensive exchange of complex Word documents with an M$-only shop. And it’s damn slow on Linux for me, as opposed to Win98.
So i’m still stuck with Word…
“But if there isn’t, I think what we need to do is get a list started up with some professional writers, and collect some opinions about what they value most in a word processor.”
It should be fast, completely bug free (never ever crashing or losing work), have a good spelling checker, and give a word count when you hit one F key.
It does not need any layout or image handling facilities. These are the domain of DTP programs (Pagestream for Linux is on its way). If you write for magazines, the designer in the publisher’s office will do the layout using Quark. He or she will want plain ASCII text (or at most RTF), with the pictures as separate files.
Some authors design and lay out their own books. In that case, a proper DTP program is needed. The purpose of a word processor is to prepare text for layout in a layout (DTP) program.
I think it is unlikely that a free program would have a good spelling checker.
Kword is excelent
I think all the answer is your comment. Let me be breif, and stated it as the usual linux troll, not surprised to see gain and Keverything mentionned.
Back to the question, really nothing can make a word proc _not_ acceptable.
But this is far away from the only matter of interest : what can make a word proc acceptable, lets say good.
A little, oh very little thing : the number of users of this word proc…
That’s all ?
Yes ;-)))
Why ?
Documents exchange…
So, i feel sorry for you, your comments on this point or this other point were fine, but those arguments can’t save either Kword or another one from isolation.
Obviously, the den of linux troll named linuxmain dot _com_, is far over your statement, but they have been used to shouting this kind of nonsense…
And the worst to last : the future of Linux ( on desktop ) is _mainly_ driven by OO, only as a substitute for MS Office, therefore, to exchange documents ( not really write them, exchange and read ). OO is not famous, that’s true. Or… IBM have some surprise for the next year ( an old java application recollection ).
This world is really tough, especially for the honourable linux troll ;-))))))))))
“There’s another aspect to this that needs to be considered. The free software community is SO determined to make their products “free” (both speech AND beer) that they’re ignoring the fact that there are people like me who will WILLINGLY pay for good software.”
Sadly all those people are ignoring the very obvious: they could spend the same money they’d pay for “good software” paying for some programmer to make existing OSS “good software”. There is currently only one example I know where one ordinary persons pays for a developer to improve existing OSS, and it works great: http://quanta.sourceforge.net/ It be really great to see more of this gem.
Try lyx, it’s great. http://www.lyx.org,
and I have RPM’s for Red Hat Linux 9 at http://utelsystems.dyndns.org
I know I shouldn’t feed the trolls, but that’s never stopped me before…
The idea of believing in free software is not communist. First of all, if you’re even using the word communism to refer to free software, you’re one of the hundreds of millions of people who have no understanding of communism beyond Cold War propoganda. Second, Free Software is very different from communism, as it was implemented in most communist countries. Free software is all about freedom. There is no entity forcing users to do certain things a certain way. Programmers share their code with the community out of their own free will. They enjoy having code easily available, and that’s why the GPL it: to make sure it stays that way. The GPL is hardly flawed. If you’re in the game just to make money, then by all means, DON’T PUT YOUR CODE UNDER THE GPL! There are many that believe that making money needn’t be contridictory to GPL’ed code, but if you’re not one of those people, by all means release under a different license. Second, far too many people here seem blinded by their desktop orientation.
Free software can, and often does, lead to highly competitive software. Think Apache, MySQL, GCC, the Linux kernel, FreeBSD, Mozilla, etc. There is *tons* of software out there that easily competes with or beats proprietory software. Even market segments that you wouldn’t except OSS to be good at are often dominated by OSS software. LAME, for example, is the best MP3 encoder availabe, and Ogg Vorbis wins quality test after quality test. The fact that there are a few desktop market segments that
OSS software has yet to be competitive in (Word Processors, E Mail clients) says little of the development model as a whole.
PS> I really hate it when people say that OSS must give up the idea of freedom to cater to the mass market. I know I reflect the ideas of many OSS software users when I say: screw the masses. What have they done for me that I should abandon my principles for them?
Good word processors
The lack of good word processors is an OS X problem too. I like Abiword as it can save to xhtml, and palm doc as well as handle pngs and do on the fly spell check. I don’t use LyX because it can’t handle PNGs unless you write scripts.
Text Editor + Publishing
The publishing program and text editor combination is a good idea in principle except that most documents I create this would make it double the work as they only need to be lightly formatted.
My solution
I like the solution of creating a web page (with Open Office for example) and then converting it to pdf with htmldoc. I did that with my poetry and with Adobe Acrobat Reader it gives you bookmarks to the different sections.
Amen to that, in Lyx you just write and forget about formatting and everything else. I use it to write design documentation all the time.
You dont spend hours trying to get a specific formatting thing right until you are done. Its totally the opposite in word or conventional word processors, where reformatting can be a pain once you wrote dozens of pages.
Obviously, some people are doing it, but really, a purely dektop-user tool like a word processor, that has very little use to developers, is going to be an attractive project for most in the Open Source community.
The idea that the holy grail of the OSS community is the provision of a MS Office replacement for the world’s oppressed desktop users is just not accurate.
I’m a software developer, but I have no desire whatsoever to write or contribute to a word processor, especially one that has as its only meaningful goal the cloning of Microsoft Word’s UI, protocols and file formats. The whole idea is just totally uninteresting and uninspiring to me.
The real problem is that only a small minority of people who use word processors more than 10 minutes a month are interested in building a better one, and only a tiny fraction of those people would be interested in doing it without the prospect of significant financial gain.
There actually isn’t a huge team of programmers out there waiting patiently for your complaints about the software you have to use/buy so they can clone them, fix the bugs in them and release them at no cost to you.
Free Software gets written because there are groups (often, groups of 1) of people who are interested in implementing and/or improving software tools in a specific area.
There is no failure of the ‘OSS community’ here, the failure is the ‘Word Processing community’ which pretty much does not exist. Almost nobody who uses a word processor seems to consider the possibility that they might be able to create even a ‘marginally adequate’ word processor.
Of course it is unrealistic to expect that joe average, secretary who spends 8 hours a day using a word processor, should have any interest whatsoever in hacking on a replacement for MS Word, but it is also entirely unrealistic that jane geek, computer programmer who spends no hours a day using a word processor, should waste her time hacking a replacement for MS Word that she will never use.
OSS software grows to support the needs of a committed and interested community, and there is no such community in the Word Processing world.
Of course there is no ‘marginally adequate’ community word processor, there is no ‘marginally adequate’ community around word processing.
Woops.. this:
that has very little use to developers, is going to be an attractive project for most in the Open Source community.
should have a ‘not’ in it:
that has very little use to developers, is not going to be an attractive project for most in the Open Source community./;
“The lack of good word processors is an OS X problem too.”
Erm, I quite like Appleworks and, well isn’t MS Word well thought of amongst the word processing cognoscenti?
Why is it always the fault of the GPL when people don’t get the MS clones they want?
Microsoft could make word for Linux if they wanted to, it isn’t neccessary for it to be under the GPL. Look at Opera they sale the browser.
If there is really that much demand why not start a company and make it?
As for RedHat how much of it is made by RedHat? Installer maybe? They modify KDE,Gnome.
Yes, I know they have released a lot of code, But still the majority of thier distro is available to anyone who wants it.
That kind of confussions could be solved bery easily.
Say:
*Posted by Eugenia Loli-Queru on 2003-05-10 16:57:15
instead of:
*By Eugenia Loli-Queru – Posted on 2003-05-10 16:57:15
Come on, it’s really confussing reading:
“Editorial: Company or community?
By Eugenia Loli-Queru – Posted on 2003-05-10 16:57:15”
This confusses people!
Yet another product is Hancom. Commercial but cheaper than TM. OSNews reviewed it a year ago – http://en.hancom.com/products/review.html.
When someone can take Red Hat or Mandrake’s hard work, burn CD copies and then sell them for $5.00 a pop, that’s just plain WRONG.
No it isn’t because Redhat and Mandrake give you that right by releasing under GPL. If I create something then it is mine to either give away or keep for myself. There is no honor system to the GPL. You completely misunderstand the point. The GPL frees me to release my software for free and know it will stay that way. There is nothing wrong about it.
Also you accuse the free software community of neglecting you. Well they aren’t. If you want commercial software and it doesn’t exist it is the commercial community neglecting you.
I tried lyx today at the suggestion of some people here. I kind of like it. I typically have always enjoyed the WYSIWYG word processors more. As MS added more autoformatting and whatnot it got really annoying to me. Lyx, kind of takes the autoformatting idea to the extreme, but I actually do kind of like it.
I am not sure if it is good for everyone, but I would imagine it more than meets the needs of most people. However, the output to pdf and output to html produce pure garbage. Someone might want to fix that as either one is a major eyesore.
Something is messed up if pdf output is messed up. Lyx is a “editor” which uses a markup language called lyx, which can be thought of as an extension of LaTeX. There are people who write documents directly in lyx the langauge… anyway, the point is that Lyx eventaully produces a LaTeX file which can be rendered to postscript or pdf. So the problem is probably something with fonts. (maybe your PDF view. Have you tried using different viewers?)
I notice that sometimes depending on the system, the pdf will look HORRIBLE in xpdf or ghostview or acrobat, only to print out looking like a million bucks!
I really recommend going through some of the tutorials at http://www.lyx.org if you are interested in using it. It is most powerful if you want consistence and easy of created professional looking works. For 1 page documents it can be overkill, but for longer works it takes all the pain of dealing with layout issues (I have seen people spend hours wasting time with layout!)…
(using Lyx to write my thesis … much better than latex)
>>>The GPL is flawed. It’s a wonderful idea that ignores market realities. It depends on an honor system in a less-than-honorable world.
No, I disagree. The GNU and FSF never cares about making money off the GPL license. Linus never cares about making money off his linux creation. It’s RedHat and Mandrake that are crashing Linus’ party and trying to make money.
>>>When someone can take Red Hat or Mandrake’s hard work, burn CD copies and then sell them for $5.00 a pop, that’s just plain WRONG.
No, that’s plain wrong. If you think about the problem further, $5 a pop is still too expansive. Walmart has the market size and IT technology to sell RedHat CD’s for 50 cents each and still make a profit (and Walmart will probably make a profit that is greater than Redhat themselves).
Have you tried using different viewers?
Yes.
It may print out fine, but that doesn’t help when I am trying to make a document to exchange electronically.
> Why can’t the community write something that good?
Because your idea of good and someone else’s idea of good will vary greatly. Anyway, Abiword is good bar font rendering, KWord is good except its written with QT, OO is good but it takes a while to load the libs but i can tolerate this ;-))))
It’s good to see that linux now has a decent word processor. Globe productive also had promise, or seemed to…
Actually it is possible for free software teams to develop a decent word processor and other productivity apps, even with fairly small teams of programmers and users/testers working together. KWord had promise. However, Kde’s philosphy prevents that from happening, ever. Kde and useful applications which are competive with commecial offerings for commercial operating systems like MS Windows are mutually exclusive.
There have also been several smaller word processors which were usable although not nearly as feature rich (for users unfamiliar with scripting) as commercial word processors available for Windows 10 years ago. Siag and Ted. They also lack a modern looking, slick interface, such as Kde can provide.
Back to Kde and Koffice. KOffice is bloated, slow, buggy and lacking in features most users need for most tasks while chock full of features users don’t want because the philosphy of Kde emphasizes using all aspects of the Qt/Kde library and interface even when that adds no value, rather than the practical needs of a particular application. Integration, imbedding, OOP purity, toolbars, floating toolbars, DCOP, etc., rule Kde and KOffice has its own variations on these and other Kde gimmicks. Somewhere in there the application developer is expected to also design and code a product which meets the needs of users for a particular application which in the case of a word processor is formatting and processing text in a variety of types. But only after the Kde developer has met the first requirement of being a “real” kde developer and team player, which is explained below…
A project which has the one and only purpose of showing off the different features of a commercial/free toolkit (Qt) cannot be expected to pay much attention to the needs of people who are not developers to use their computers for some purpose of their choosing, except to impress their friends with desktop eye candy and neat features. What gets one ahead at Kde is using every possible feature of Qt no matter how much bloat and needless complexity that adds to the superstructure, which is now almost as resource-hungry as Microsoft Windows XP.
It is possible to design and code efficient, useful, easy-to-use and good looking applications with Qt, but that is not the purpose of the Kde or Koffice projects. Too bad.
I might have problems with the reality of the GPL’s implementation/wording (Not with it’s stated goals), but its mere existence most certainly does not hinder the viability of Linux as the platform for commercial software.
What DOES inhibit commercial software is that Linux is a continuously moving target. Open source has the luxury of either the end-user or distribution manager being able to compile the application for a specific distribution. Proprietary software applications, that don’t use one of the various bytecode interpreting VMs, get locked into expecting a certain system configuration because they get distributed in compiled binaries.
Now with kernel 2.6 around the corner (Which apparently breaks compatibility with 2.4), and various core libraries providing little to no backward compatibility, software houses would find themselves spending an awful lot of money producing nice clingfilm wrapped applications for Linux only to discover that a couple of months down the line they have to tell their users not to keep up with the Linux evolution, because their product won’t work with the latest distributions.
It also affects the end user, or more precisely the attractiveness of commercial software to the end user. I know that I for one would be unhappy to shell out for a commercial application whilst knowing that if I want to keep using it for any length of time I have to maintain my system in its current form, or get locked in an upgrade cycle (There are enough of them in the world already).
I appreciate the reasons why the kernel/library developers don’t particularily want to maintain backward compatibility, and I appreciate that these things are destined to evolve, but it leaves a very small lifespan window for commercial applications to exist in.
Hopefully as the years go by the kernel and libraries, as they cease to alter so radically from version to version, will stop being so difficult a target to hit, and commercial software on the platform will be a more attractive proposition for both developers and end users. Until that happens having access to an application’s source code is pretty much a requirement, for at least your distribution manager if not every end-user.
Anyhow, that’s my take on one of the reasons why you won’t see commercial word processors hitting the Linux platform any time soon, no matter how desperately needed they may or may not be.
Are you mad, boy? A full KDE/Linux installation, with *everything* (office suite, browser, news readers, config tools, you name it) tips the scales at a hair over 1GB, or only slightly larger than a bare WinXP installation. KOffice itself is rather spartan in features. All the KOffice apps put together add up to about 50MB compressed, slightly over 100MB installed. That’s significantly smaller than just Word alone. Sure, all KDE apps have a great deal of sophistication, but that’s inherited for free from the KDE framework, which is very powerful and very comprehensive. Are there any specifics you’d like to share with us about why you think KOffice is bloated, or are do you not have any?
What happened to the fonts?!?
Fonts on TM (the free version) under Linux look terrible, and I am not sure how to change its settings to allow for anti-aliasing. This is one of the most important parts of a word processor when I’ve had to stare at a screeen and write an 80+ page paper on antimicrobial resistant bacteria in the past. Hard to read fonts are a quick way to frustrate me.
Why do imported images look so BAD?!?
I tried inserting some of my personal logos that I have saved in *.png format. Some of them have areas that are supposed to be transparent, but TM inserts background colors.
Why don’t they make an itegrated office suite?
An integrated office suite is very convenient for me when working on projects that require handouts, spreadsheets, and maybe even a presentation. TM’s lack of functionality is another hinderance.
Other than being a little slow on start-up OOo is an excellent choice for me. I can open, modify, and save most Microsoft documents, presentations, and spreadsheets on the fly if work sends me something. On my home computers I always save everything in OOo format, and have OOo on my WinNT box at work, which eliminates the rare import problem.
I disagree with the author, the open source alternatives to proprietary software are excellent,…or at least they are good for me;)
The problem that you are having is due to the fact that the default settings on Lyx use type 3 fonts which are bitmapped. Acrobat Reader reproduces them with very poor quality (Xpdf wont show them at all while they look passable in gv). You need to force Lyx to use type 1 scalable outline fonts.
In the Lyx menu Edit|Preferences|Misc set the “Use scalable fonts box” and this will force Lyx only to use the scalable type 1 fonts you have on your system.
It means you can’t use Knuth’s Computer Modern fonts (Widely used by matematicians and physicists for their publications) but if you want you can get good type 3 replacements for them both free and propriety.
“Life is just a chemical scum” – Stephen Hawking
By the way I too – like SeanParsons – use OOo as my main Wordprocessor and office suite at home.
I agree:
>Other than being a little slow on start-up OOo is an >excellent choice for me. I can open, modify, and save most >Microsoft documents, presentations, and spreadsheets on the >fly if work sends me something. On my home computers I >always save everything in OOo format, and have OOo on my >WinNT box at work, which eliminates the rare import >problem.
At work I have done a installed OOo on our departmental demonstration Linux server so that we can use OOo on all of the pc’s in our lab. I use OOo in preference to MS Office wherever I can, but then I have been using OOo/SO for getting on for 2 or 3 years now starting with StarOffice 5.2.
Well, apart from some sledging by those in the cheap seats, I find that K-Office is the only Office suite so far on *NIX/*BSD that is on the right track.
Tight integration between the different components such as Kword, kspreadsheet and kpresentations. GNOME on the other hand has GNUmeric and abiword, which are all very nice, however, until they’re ported purely to GTK2, GNOME will always be one step behind.
I refer you all to an interview between John Gruber (of DaringFireball) and Maarten Hekkelman (author of Pepper, a text editor ala BBEdit) from August 30th, 2002:
http://daringfireball.net/2002/08/pepper_author_maarten_hekkelman.h…
Read the part where the author states that, out of the thousands of copies of his software downloaded, he had three sales, and one of those three sales was fraudulent. And this is only one article about one author selling one product…
If you were a strategist at Adobe, or Apple, or Corel, or Microsoft, or one of countless other businesses considering porting software to Linux-based systems, and you read that, what would your recommendation be about the vast market of people willing to pay for good software on Linux-based systems?
Yes, it’s true there are many text editors on Linux-based systems already, with no real motivation to pay for an editor. And yes, it’s true that Pepper is proprietry software, not open-source. But remember, you could substitute ‘Pepper’ for ‘Word/Write/etc.’ and ‘text editor’ for ‘word processor’, and both of those points would still apply.
Open-source developers have long ago said that they don’t march to the beat of the end-users’ drums, as stated in the Linux&Main article. But if they won’t do it, and commercial developers won’t do it for fear of situations like the above, where does that leave us? Where we are today, with productivity suites lagging behind what’s available on competing platforms for a variety of reasons.
When you posit this to most developers, they cry foul and say that there are no fair choices available, that someone has to lose. And they’re right, it’s not fair; life’s like that.
OO is not good enough for you? I am annoyed at the slow load time too, but if its linux, and you are at work who cares? I have been trying to get my users (and myself, smile!) to load OO and leave it ON. Just click a new desktop and open OO. Leave it there, its always ready. Linux is like that, users migrating from MS products dont get that.
The first problem we have had was getting people used to it. They wanted a manual, they got one, its a book that costs about $20.
Myself, I didnt need it, and I prefer OO over MS office any day. I dont know what the problem was with the reviewer, I would like to find out. My friend came by to help my wife with a document she was editing, I was too busy, and he is a big MS user, he understood it was different, but he got it to do what he wanted with little effort.
So what I want to know, aside from slow boot times, and sometimes a poor rendering of .doc documents, whats it lacking? If you are making a native OO document whats the problem? As far as grammer checking goes I turn it off in MS products anyways, dont let this quick post fool you, I am quite capable of writing grammatically correct sentences, although I don’t spell so well, but thats because I have used word processors far too long!
“The publishing program and text editor combination is a good idea in principle except that most documents I create this would make it double the work as they only need to be lightly formatted.”
No, it is the same amount of work, except that you have to open the layout program and import your word-processed document. Even when you are doing your own layout, I believe it helps to concentrate on the words when you are writing, and leave the appearance until later.
Process your words and images in a word processor and an image processor, then bring them together in a layout program. This allows several people to work on various images and text that go to make up a finished document.
Of course there is no need to be insanely rigid about this. If you are just doing a ten-line letter, you can type straight on the DTP page; or if you are just making rough notes, you can print out straight from a word processor.
Microsoft Word is not a high powered word processor – it is a poor DTP program.
One important feature of a word processor (as opposed to a text editor) is that it should output text with line endings only at the end of each paragraph, so that the text will flow properly in the layout. Text editors put an EOL after every 80 or so characters. A word processor also needs to be able to merge these separated lines into paragraphs.
A word processor is for writing. Text editors are primarily for programming, including jobs like editing config files.
Another thing that is needed is a good OCR program. The only good one I have seen is called ABBYY and runs on Windows. This converted my test scans from old books with very few errors, while a Linux one I tested got less than half the characters right.
The writer did not talk about Hancom Office or Shaolin Office i would like that writers would dig more before they would write an article.
Hancom office is a very good office soltion for Linux.
I use it very often. It has loads of features (word, paint, spread, presentation etc) is very fast and stable as a rock. Importing complicated excel files is not always 100% good but
its way better than Ooo or wordperfect.
http://www.hancom.com
I see this all the time from certain quarters and it’s become an accepted truth among many fans of this combination. The minor problem is that it absolutely is not true.
If your tasks involve:
* Basic business correspondence
* Non-technical manuscript writing
* Mailing list
* Integrating graphics in otherwise simple documents
These programs will simply be far more trouble than a solid word processor. (I specify “otherwise simple” for the last one to accent that even if desktop publishing programs may be “the right way” to integrate graphics and text, using LaTeX or InDesign to drop three charts from a spreadsheet program into an 8-page memo you’re writing is like flying a Lear Jet to the grocery store.) For a simple one-page letter, LaTeX (or LyX–yes, I’ve tried it, but haven’t warmed up to it compared to using a good text editor directly) is at best no faster than Microsoft Word. Mailing lists aren’t technically possible in the programs, as far as I know. Being able to prepare your document straight in LaTeX for O’Reilly or the American Mathematical Society doesn’t mean jack if you’re preparing your document for Analog Science Fiction. Proper manuscript format requires hard copy, double spaced 12-point Courier with underlining, not italics, and requires straight quotes, “–” instead of em dashes, and so on.
Opera web browser is incredibly popular on Linux, and the CEO of that company said that the percentage of paying users per download for Linux was on par with Windows. He said that Linux users are willing to pay for good software. Also, because they are using QT, most of their code is cross platform, so a Linux version is not a significant burden and is generating revenue for them.
Your example is flawed because the author made software nobody wanted (or there were enough free equivalents that there was no point in paying for it). Opera is the best web browser in the world right now. No other free or commercial web browser can compete for features and speed – and this is why they are making money. Make good software, and people will pay.
see:
http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/04/26/1310230&mode=thread&ti…
I must say that LyX is a fantastic document processor. Mostly due to TeX and LaTeX of course. I’ve been completely amazed at how well it has formatted my documents (I can sum up how it positions figures and paragraphs as “it just does the right thing”). TeX blows Word’s formatting out of the water.
Note that I write technical documents and will use a WYSIWYG word processor like Star/Openoffice when appropriate (e.g. for something simple with a couple of pictures in it). Right tool for the right job (I don’t understand why everybody wants these “everything + kitchen sink” programs? I would rather multiple specialised programs rather than a big bloaty mess that tries to do everything (and ends up doing it poorly i.e. jack of all trades, master at none).
I’m interested in trying out groff though (pity there’s no LyX equivalent for groff). Anybody want to comment on groff (troff) vs TeX ?
Textmaker lacks a couple of features present in Word Perfect, anyway. The first missing item is columns. Support for graphic boxes is somewhat limited by file type and by size. Neither the graphic boxes or text boxes support captions. Table support, like Word’s, is pretty basic. If you want formulas, use a separate spreadsheet. There is nothing like Word Perfect’s built in spread sheet and drawing support.
TextMaker supports columns (see Format > Section); no need for text frames here. TextMaker supports, at last count, 15 picture file formats, and is using stuff like libjpeg, libtiff etc., so image file size shouldn’t be a problem.
TextMaker’s tables do support calculations with sum() over ranges, if(), date and time calculation, grabbing fields from databases etc., and even allow you to mix results from text frames and tables: =Textframe1.Value+sum(Table1.#a1;#b9)*DropdownList5.Value . You can also place the result in a variable for lookup later down in the document.
Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH
I don’t agree with his harsh assessments of all word processors he’s tried (save TextMaker, of course); I’m surprised he hasn’t snapped a copy of WordPerfect8 for Linux off ebay for a song, since it’s excellent (aged, but excellent). I’m a professional writer, and WordPerfect is my tool of choice–reveal codes are a manuscript writer’s Godsend!
I do, however, agree wholeheartedly with the notion that commercial software for Linux must be embraced. Commercial ventures, by and large, are better at listening to the masses because that’s how they make their living. They also have quicker development times, in general, because they can afford to be dedicated (time-wise, not passion-wise) and they usually have a large number of people working on each project. If Linux is to expand its user base (which is good for everyone, even the technogeeks living in their moms’ basements, because a larger user base means more and better apps), it needs to offer more apps that compete with Windows and Mac commercial offerings–and commercial developers, by and large, will be the ones who will accomplish this.
I downloaded the Textmaker beta and found it a very usefull
fast and feature rich application however if you aim on the Limux market you better would support import/open for openoffice/staroffice and wordperfect. export to *.eps and *.pdf is also a MUST have (ok you can export to *.ps by printing the document to file). And please make a universal
database programming ( ala Access and Ooo Abacus) based on gamba’s. Thank you!
digitaleon, it’s funny that you need to pick up Pepper as an “example that Linux users don’t buy commercial products” while your linked interview showed that the latest version was not well received on all supported platforms which includes MacOS 9.x, MacOS X, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. 1000 downloads by far don’t make 1000 happy users (you don’t even know whether it runs at all in all those case) so the sell quota of 0.2% could be even worse considering the general perception. Pepper author Maarten Hekkelman consequently stopped developing it and even said he finally has spare time again in years. I wish him well.
If one wants a specific feature in OSS pay one its programmers to implement it. If everyone does so everybody would be happy.
I downloaded the Textmaker beta and found it a very usefull
fast and feature rich application however if you aim on the Limux market you better would support import/open for openoffice/staroffice and wordperfect. export to *.eps and *.pdf is also a MUST have (ok you can export to *.ps by printing the document to file). And please make a universal
database programming ( ala Access and Ooo Abacus) based on gamba’s. Thank you!
Word filters were our top priority, but we know that people want OpenOffice and WordPerfect filters.
Re: PDF, call up File>Print, and if you have ps2pdf installed, it will be one of the “printer drivers”. You don’t even have to print to a PS file.
Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH
First, yes, I was confused at authorship, but it was my own fault. I was so busy reading the article I just assumed that it had been written by Eugenia.
> No it isn’t because Redhat and Mandrake give you that
> right by releasing under GPL.
That’s true. But at least in part, they are compelled to do so by the fact that most of the Gnu/Linux system was developed under that license. They are also compelled to do so by public pressure in the free software community.
I think you’re missing my point, anyway. Red Hat, Mandrake and Suse should realize that THEY need to change their licensing model whenever possible.
It is entirely possible to have open-source software without the complete anarchy that exists under the GPL. And the real problem is the ATTITUDE of the free software community, which generally does think “free beer” instead of “free speech.”
It is wrong for CheapBytes.com to make copies of CDs and sell them. This isn’t a legality issue; of course they can do it legally. It is a moral issue. It’s just plain wrong.
Here’s the kicker, read this carefully: if the free software community REALLY cared about supporting free software, CheapBytes would go out of business, because few would buy those cloned CDs, choosing — out of CONSCIENCE — to support the distribution directly.
> Also you accuse the free software community of
> neglecting you.
??? I never said that. You’re thinking of someone else.
MY point was that I am perfectly willing to pay for good software. How you derived that statement from what I said escapes me.
The problem isn’t with the GPL. If proprietary is the way to go you have skads of choices (read Microsoft). Why give up on community so some cheap-assed writers can get a industrial strength word processor without having to pay for it.
In his effort to prove his hypothesis, the author pretty much invalidated it in my eyes. The author brought up the example of Opera vs. Mozilla. Sure, the Mozilla GUI sucks (my opinion) and is pretty slow. However, the author completely ignores Phoenix (aka Mozilla-Firebird), Galeon, and Epiphany. All of these browsers ROCK and are offshoots of the Mozilla projects. In general they render pages better than Opera and do pretty well speed-wise. Konqueror also renders well and is very fast. The open source community doesn’t always get it right (and rarely gets it right the first time), but true gems do come along (just like with commercial software).
I must admit that I don’t really like OO.o, but it gets the job done. Guess what? Word sucks pretty bad too. It is horrible at integrating multiple documents from different people into a single large document. It sucks so bad, that rather than working on pieces independently, my development team has to work from a single .doc file and add our parts individually, one-by-one. You’d think they would have fixed that by now. I had the same problem back in 1993.
I agree that there should be room in the Linux world for both community and commercial projects. Too many Linux guys hate projects because they aren’t free (Lindows, Xandros, Libranet) or they don’t release the source even though they are free (nvidia drivers for instance). However, give its ubiquity, a word processor (or office suite for that matter) is an IDEAL candidate for an open source project. I see the real future of commercial Linux software in specialized professional applications.
I was ready to leave this thread, because it’s getting too long, but I had to respond to this.
> The problem isn’t with the GPL. If proprietary is the
> way to go you have skads of choices (read Microsoft).
This isn’t an either-or thing. Didn’t I say I supported open source and open formats? There are licenses OTHER than the GPL which guarantee that I have access to the source.
The very reason why the Open Source movement was started as an *offshoot* of the FSF/GNU/GPL efforts was because the GPL model is flawed. There’s just no way to make money off of the software with it.
Off of support, services and hardware, yes. But not off of the software.
Enough. Just re-read what I said and you’ll see that I’m not opposed to free software in any way. I get a lump in my throat everytime I use my Linux system, thinking about all the people who’ve worked hard on this software. I am GRATEFUL For their efforts.
I think they should be compensated, and I just want to figure out some way to keep companies like Mandrake from being forced into bankruptcy. It WILL continue to happen under the pure, 100% GPL.
The GPL model is not flawed! It was not designed to make it possible to make money off software. It performs its designed purpose (assuring that software under the license remains free as in speech) very well.
I think expiring licences are the key to the solution but I don’t think they will be adapted until free software’s shortcomings are clear to the community. Let them buy the software, let them look at its source -say- six months after the release, auto GPL the source -say- two years after the release.
Companies which develop GPLed software without contributing back until release (eg. Codeweavers) are using essentially the same model. They use the time between their release until everyone else’s release as an opportunity. However time lag is too low. One can increase the window only by using non revocable, auto-time-out licences.